Sunday, August 6, 2017

That the entire US Congress seems to crave war exposes the terms Democrat, Republican, left, and right, as meaningless. Obsession with Trump the man is a great danger for everyone. The coup against him is because he doesn't want war with Russia and 63 million voters and 306 electors agree with him-John Pilger, Consortium News...('The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, and we won't come back...')

"I read On the Beach for the first time the other day,
finishing it as the U.S. Congress passed a law to wage economic war on
Russia, the world’s second most lethal nuclear power. There was no
justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings,
they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them
democracies, and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in
Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indochina, which President Reagan
called “a noble cause” and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an
“exceptional people.” He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a
National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young
teenagers. “Listen up,” he said. “We lost 58,000 young soldiers in
Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom.”

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom
was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people
were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders
took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time
magazine calls “an eternal present.” Harold Pinter described this as
“manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for
universal good,a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of
hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened.
Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It
was of no interest.”

While they pursue their fossilized anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardiansuppress the essence of the most important political story of our time
as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the
“national security” managers who guard a system based on war,
surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther
King called them “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world
today.”

In response, “partnership” is a word used incessantly by Vladimir
Putin – anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war
in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear
and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have
war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon.
Their history tells them to get ready.

The admiral commanding the U.S. Pacific fleet said that, “if
required,” he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly
in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil
Shute’s fiction.

Silencing Dissenting Journalists

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the
bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting
is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits,
dominate: editors are infotainment or party-line managers. Where there
was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés.
Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China,
John Bordne, a member of a U.S. Air Force missile combat crew based in
Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 – during the Cuban missile crisis –
he and his colleagues were “told to launch all the missiles” from their
silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia.A
junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded –
but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to
shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not “stand down.”

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the
United States was such that U.S. officials who were on official business
in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 – the year Shute
wrote On the Beach – no official in the State Department could
speak the language of the world’s most populous nation. Mandarin
speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional
bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

One of Obama’s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a
record $618 billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy
of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has
endorsed this.

"John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. His new film, “The Coming War on China,” is available in the U.S. from www.bullfrogfilms.com"